Air Force One, the US president's plane, is forced to make an emergency landing on a private airstrip in Little Ashford, England. While it is being repaired the president and his team decamp to a nearby hotel, The Nearby Hotel.

It transpires that the malfunction was no accident, and that one of the president's own team must be a saboteur. Meanwhile, a bunch of terrorists - led by Radocheck Zeigler, 'The Butcher of Bosnia' - raid the hotel disguised as bakers, kill the president's bodyguards and take the president and the other hotel guests hostage.

Zeigler attempts to uncover a computer password permitting access to the president's nuclear arsenal. But cometh the hour, cometh the man: the only hope of thwarting the terrorists is assistant hotel manager Ben Carter, an ex-soldier who has previously encountered the evil Zeigler in Bosnia.

Carter is still in love with his former girlfriend, the receptionist Tricia, but she is now dating Hilton, the oily hotel manager. Tricia helps Carter in his quest to foil the terrorists but Hilton, trying to save his own skin, sides with Zeigler.

Elsewhere there is the gormless hotel porter Henry, guileless American guest Frank Sneider, brainless cop Inspector Cochrane (who acts like a member of Los Angeles Police department rather than Little Ashford Police Department), tactless Thyme magazine journalist Polly Doyle, and a ruthless female terrorist, Amanda Brown.